I recently found a great sound engine for iPhone applications that is pretty much plug-and-play. OpenAL lets you play multiple sounds at once This sound engine was written by Alex Restrepo under a creative commons attribution-share alike licence, so you are free to use it so long as you attribute the code to the author and if you change it and share it you must do so under the same license. I have corrected one small mistake (a semi-colon where it should not have been) and also edited the formatting…

I recently discovered the Gource open source project which has been around for a few years. It allows you to easily visualize the history of your projects version control system. To use Gource, you install it on your computer and then run it from the command line in your version controlled directory. I found the easiest way to install Gource was to use MacPorts. Up till now I have always avoided MacPorts but Gource has a lot of dependencies and I was having trouble getting all of them to install.…

Pachube is a web service that enables you to connect, tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments around the world. PachubeMon is a utility app for the iPhone that lets you manage and view your Pachube feeds all in one place. The main page allows you to add and remove feeds. By selecting a feed from the list you can view it. You can find feed IDs on the Pachube website . For a fascinating deeper look at Pachube and the concepts around it,…

After coding for iPhone for the last month and a half, I figured it was time I finally got one of the coveted devices for myself. This week I have been having fun setting it up, checking my email, and browsing the app store. They really are a marvel of technology and raise my expectaions in terms of elegance and functionality for all devices. Today, in addition to working hard on my upcoming app release (which I am very excited about) I have been playing with the TouchOSC app from hexler.net. TouchOSC, available from…

Below is described a sequencing solution for modular drum modules using Ableton Live, a custom Max4Live device that converts MIDI notes to CC gates, and a MIDI to CV interface that can convert MIDI CC to CV. If you just want to grab the Note2CCGate Max4Live device you can grab on my server here or from maxforlive.com here. I recently picked picked up three new drum modules from TipTop Audio; the BD808, SD808 and HATS808. These are clones of the kick, snare, open hi hat and closed hi hat of the classic Roland…

A question that has been asked a lot on my iOS Still Image Capture With AVCaptureSession post is how to combine the overlay image that is shown with the image that is being captured by the camera. The more general question is how to combine two images so that is what I will show first and then I will give you my updated captureStillImage method that you can add to the AROverlayImageCapture example project which is available here. Let’s say we have two images we want to combine; say an…

This is my first post in a planned series on modular synthesis. Over the course of the series I hope to provide an introduction to the basics of modular synthesizers and take a look at some of the specific modules available in the increasingly popular Eurorack format. I am by no means an expert on the subject but believe I know enough to hopefully provide a place for beginners to learn the fundamentals. I will rely on the critical feedback of my learned readers to kindly point out any inaccuracies…

I had a request to show how to capture a still image of the live video feed in the AROverlayExample project. This is probably the simplest use of the output of the AVCaptureSession possible so I have created a new project based off of the AROverlayExample that uses the scan button to capture an image and saves the image to your device’s photo album. You can get the source code for AROverlayImageCapture here. Here are the instructions for how to do this starting with the AROverlayExample. If you haven’t already,…

There seems to be a lot of interest recently in making apps that use a camera view with an overlay for augmented reality or what some might call pseudo-augmented reality applications (because often these apps just layer an image or data on a camera view). I wasn’t satisfied with the few examples I found on the topic so I decided to try one myself. I will endeavour to make it as clear as I can and show you how to make a custom button while I am at it, but…

With my recent upgrade to Xcode 4 I have run into some problems archiving my apps and creating ad hoc builds to distribute to clients. I think I finally have a handle on all the steps and thought I would share them here for your reference and mine. Before we get into creating an ad hoc build I want to put in a word on distributing ad hoc builds in general. It used to be that the way to do this was to build your ad hoc app signed against…